


Stealing Moments

by ashkatom



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-20
Updated: 2012-04-20
Packaged: 2017-11-03 23:18:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/387091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The voices are too loud, it's raining, and your travel companion will not shut up. Time to trip over your own feet and let someone else do the hard work for a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stealing Moments

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobotSquid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobotSquid/gifts).



Good things come in twos. Bad things come in threes. For example, right now you are soaked to the bone from rain, your travel companion will not stop ranting , and the voices in your head will not just shut their stupid non-existent facegashes. Furthermore, the headache they’re giving you is making you – _you,_ Pollux Castor! – completely incapable of doing so much as raising a psionic rain shield, let alone flying the both of you back home.

On the plus side, Karcin finally stops ranting when you trip over your own feet and can’t be bothered getting back up. The mud under your fingers is cool, and you squish your face into it like it’s sopor slime while Karcin gets over his _oh gog OH GOG oh gog OH GOG_ panic fit.

You contemplate raising an arm to give him a thumbs-up, it’s cool, you’re not dead yet, but it turns out that moving is way too hard and you are probably going to be stuck in the middle of this fucking forest, covered in mud and leaf litter for the rest of your life.

There’s a flash of lightning overhead, a boom of thunder that manages to drown out even Karcin hot on its heels. He tugs uselessly at the back of your shirt, and you try to pay attention to the way it digs into your skin, sodden and slimy, instead of the voices in your head that tell you _goiing two diie, fla2h of liight, redblue, redredred, fiire, wiire2 chokiing uniiver2e gone and 2tiill we diie come two u2 everyone doe2 iin the end we know you pollux ca2tor_.

“-come _on_ you sack of skeleton, can you wait to have your breakdown until we’re under shelter so I don’t have to worry about your flesh catching some sort of disease from that mud, gog knows what’s been in it-”

You put forth an immense amount of effort, lift your hand, and pap his ankle comfortingly.

Unfortunately (okay, fortunately, _fine_ ), Karcin is used to dealing with you when the voices get too loud. At the first sign of movement he grabs your hand. In just another couple of moments, he has his shoulder wedged into your armpit and uses his new-found leverage to drag you upright. You basically chill (chill, haha, _this rain is fucking cold_ )and dangle off his shoulders, but it only takes a couple steps with your feet dragging in the mud and catching on every form of plant life known to trollkind to become apparent that this is not going to work.

“Gog have mercy on my soul, we’re going to have to work together.” Karcin prods you in the ribs. “Come on, slush-for-pan, there’s no I in team.”

You let out a low moan of pain past your headache. Feet are too hard for you right now, and he wants you to do things? He can cram those things in several places you’ve never had the occasion to visit and spit them back out into a pail in front of the drones. Still, he somehow manages to get you onto his back, your legs around his waist and arms around his shoulders. You’d make a dirty joke just to watch his reaction, but you don’t want him to drop you back in the mud.

He hooks his arms under your legs and stands back up. “Sob like a wriggler if you fall off,” he advises you, and begins trudging along. “I think there was a cave this way.”

You rest your chin between his horns, which are blunt and nubby and perfect for holding your face up, and try to doze off with a thousand hissing voices of doom as background noise.

\--

Karcin was right, there was a cave. He dumps you on the floor by the entrance unceremoniously, checks the rest for any wild animals, and then drags you further in once he’s shooshpapped them into going somewhere else. You have no idea how he isn’t dead already.

“You are going to have to stop being such a useless lump and get changed,” he informs you. “If you stay in your shitty sponge-like uniform you are going to die of a plague, and you will end up murdering every one of us as well.” When you don’t move, he nudges you with a foot. “With plague. Do you want to be responsible for Dolorosa’s skin rotting off? You are a braver man than I.”

He sounds like so much buzzing to you, which is something you’ve always liked about him. The voices are louder, but you can always count on Karcin to be an angry rise-and-fall of volume in your ears, more real than the hissing, tangled voices that go straight to your thinkpan and burrow in. You wish you could process what he’s saying, but it just flows past you.

He dumps a pile of cloth on your chest. His spare clothes, including cloak and thankfully not including leggings. You’re kind of surprised, in a dull you-don’t-actually-really-care way, that he wears anything other than his stupid leggings. They kind of smell like him as well, even though they’re clean. And dry.

You manage to sit up, take a moment to let your head stop screaming at you in pain, and start peeling your wet and muddy clothes off. You hear Karcin stutter something out and retreat, but he comes back once you’ve managed shirt and pants, takes one look at you, and wraps the cloak around your shoulders. He’s dry too, and full of redblood warmth.

He rubs your back soothingly, a lot less worried now that you’re mostly dry and have managed a task by yourself. “Can you talk yet?”

“Mnuh,” you groan.

“Nice to know,” he says. He then sits you down and decaptchalogues some travel food. Suddenly there is nothing you want more than a hot meal, but of course, the rain has made all the wood around completely unburnable. Karcin sits with you and coaxes you to eat some vegetable soup cold, which does _not_ do much for the taste.

The voices have finally quieted down a bit. Apparently they’re sick of detailing all the horrific ways in which all of your friends will die. Either that or they’ve somehow frozen to death, and you don’t feel like you’re far behind. Karcin feels your frozen fingers, gives the soup up as a lost cause, and moves until he’s leaning against the cave wall beside you. You scoot down until you can curl up against his side, done pretending that you are capable of anything on your own.  He starts rubbing the base of your neck with his thumb, pressing in with fingers and easing the tension you’ve gathered there hunching into yourself.

He fusses over you, finally dragging you into his lap and wrapping both his cloak and your borrowed one around you. Apparently you’re a bony ass who needs more body fat to live, but whatever, he only eats vegetables, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

You’re half-asleep from his slow, careful attention when he starts singing. He’s quiet for once, enough to not jolt you out of your daze, but loud enough to wind his way into your head with his rough, real voice. He manages to even drown your doom-prophet voices. His hand never leaves you, going from your neck to stroking your hair, his filed-down nails scraping gently against your scalp. When he runs out of song, he kisses the top of your head lightly.

“Keep going,” you say. Miserably, you add, “I want to throw up.”

“At least you’re speaking again.” Karcin leans down a little and kisses your forehead, then your jaw. “Warm enough?”

You reach up and pap his face. He’s used to your usual reaction to the voices getting noisy, which is to go out and pail someone because it brings you right back to your body and there’s no room for voices then, and lately he’s been expressing awkward interest in maybe being that person and you’re not really sure what to do about that.

You don’t want him like this, though. Not just using him to shut your head up. If you ever pail him, he will know exactly the depth of your red feelings for him beforehand. And also you will be sane. And in a perfect world you wouldn't be nauseated.

He sighs into the palm of your hand, rearranges you until your back is against his chest so he radiates warmth through you, and starts singing again. His voice sounds more in your bones than in your auricular sponge clots, and the rumble lulls you to sleep for the day.

\--

When you wake up everything is clear and accessible. Even this dank, tiny cave and the rain outside is beautiful. You wake Karcin up by making his hair stand on end, which earns you a punch in the shoulder, but when he sees your wide grin he punches you again in relief. You think it’s relief. You’re not quite up to date with your Punchese.

It takes you a couple of hours to fly you and Karcin back to your latest in temporary hives, and he doesn’t even threaten to cut your limbs off when you engage in a series of loops and spins because everything is _awesome_. The world always feels so much brighter when the voices recede.

You land gently outside your hive, and Karcin goes up on tiptoes to kiss you – a bit too red for pale, a bit too pale for red – pulling away just as Dolorosa and Panthe come out to greet you and make off with the stuff you brought back for them. Dolorosa’s mouth tightens a little and her eyes flick to you in disapproval, but you just give her your best blank stare as you hug Panthe and reassure her that yes, you were fine, the extra night was just because of the rain.

Karcin takes your hand in his and drags you inside even though with everything the way it is now you just want to fly. Still, if he’s the one keeping you grounded, it might just be tolerable. You let Dolorosa and Panthe go ahead to the nutrition block, then sling your arm around Karcin’s shoulders.

“If I had to be trapped in a cave with anyone, I’m glad it wath you,” you inform him solemnly.

He rolls his eyes and elbows you in the ribs. “You’re just saying that because anyone else would have let you be grubfood.”

You are as red for this idiot as his blood. One day you might even let him know.


End file.
